Sacred and Secular: Symmons Roberts's "To John Donne" and Cope's "After the Lunch"

Michael Symmons Roberts and Wendy Cope represent two very different strands of contemporary English poetry. Symmons Roberts writes with theological seriousness, drawing on his Catholic faith to explore love as a potentially sacred experience. Cope writes with disarming lightness, using traditional forms and accessible language to capture the comedy and vulnerability of everyday romantic experience. Together, they demonstrate the extraordinary range of contemporary love poetry — from the metaphysical to the mundane, from the sacred to the secular.

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Michael Symmons Roberts: "To John Donne"

Context (AO3)

Michael Symmons Roberts (born 1963) is a poet, novelist, and librettist whose work is deeply informed by his Catholic faith. His collections — including Corpus (2004), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and Drysalter (2013), which won the Forward Prize — explore the body, incarnation, mortality, and the possibility of the sacred in a secular age.

The poem's title — "To John Donne" — announces its relationship to the literary tradition. John Donne (1572–1631) is perhaps the greatest English love poet, and his career embodies a tension that is central to Symmons Roberts's own work: Donne wrote both erotic love poetry (Songs and Sonnets) and devotional poetry (Holy Sonnets, sermons, hymns), and scholars have long debated the relationship between his secular and sacred writings.

By addressing Donne directly, Symmons Roberts positions himself as an inheritor and interlocutor — someone who is continuing a conversation that Donne began four centuries ago. The "dialogue with tradition" that the poem enacts is itself a form of love: the love of a reader for a writer, the love of a contemporary poet for an ancestor.

Form and Structure

The poem uses a form that evokes Donne's own practice — intellectually complex, arguing through metaphor and conceit, moving between registers (physical and spiritual, intimate and cosmic). The address to Donne creates a verse epistle — a letter in verse, one of the oldest literary forms, used by Horace, Ovid, and Donne himself.

Close Analysis

The poem engages with one of the central questions of Donne's legacy: is there a continuity between erotic love and divine love? Donne's poetry suggests that there is — that the language of physical passion and the language of spiritual devotion are not merely analogous but draw on the same experiential sources. When Donne writes to his mistress, "For love, all love of other sights controls," he uses the same rhetorical structures as when he writes to God, "Batter my heart, three-personed God."

Symmons Roberts explores this continuity with theological sophistication. For a Catholic poet, the doctrine of the Incarnation — God becoming flesh in the person of Christ — bridges the gap between sacred and secular. If God chose to inhabit a human body, then bodily experience (including sexual experience) is not opposed to the spiritual but is potentially a vehicle for it.

The poem addresses Donne as a fellow traveller — someone who understood that love, at its most intense, partakes of the sacred. Symmons Roberts does not simply agree with Donne, however: he also questions him, challenges him, updates him. The conversation across centuries is genuine — not a one-way act of homage but a dialogue in which both participants are changed.

The poem's language moves between the physical and the metaphysical in ways that echo Donne's own practice. Images of the body — touch, breath, skin — coexist with images of the cosmos, eternity, and the divine. The effect is to suggest that the boundary between physical and spiritual is permeable — that love experienced through the body can open onto transcendence.

Different Interpretations (AO5)

• Theological reading: The poem argues for the continuity between erotic and divine love, grounded in the Catholic doctrine of Incarnation. Physical love is not a distraction from God but a pathway to God.
• Literary-historical reading: The poem is an act of creative criticism — an engagement with Donne's legacy that illuminates both Donne's work and Symmons Roberts's own. The verse epistle form connects the two poets across four centuries.
• Secular reading: The poem can be appreciated without sharing the poet's faith. The argument that intense love partakes of the transcendent is accessible even to readers who interpret "transcendence" in psychological rather than theological terms.
• Sceptical reading: Is the analogy between erotic and divine love sustainable, or does it ultimately diminish both? Donne's critics have sometimes argued that his use of erotic language for devotional purposes trivialises religion, while his use of religious language for erotic purposes inflates sex. Symmons Roberts inherits this critical tension.

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Wendy Cope: "After the Lunch"

Context (AO3)

Wendy Cope (born 1945) is one of the most popular English poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her collections — Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992), and If I Don't Know (2001) — are characterised by wit, formal skill, emotional directness, and a willingness to write about subjects that "serious" poets often disdain: romantic disappointment, everyday pleasures, the comedy of social life.